Lightweight XOR based FEC Algorithm for Fragment Forwarding in 6LoWPAN Networks

Abstract

More and more devices connect to the network leading to the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT). One of the most popular use cases is the Industrial IoT (IIoT), in which ultra-high end-to-end network reliability and low latency are the main requirements. In order to fulfill these features, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has published the 802.15.4-2015 standard and in particular, its Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode more specifically. Furthermore, to enable transmission of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) packets, the IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) adaptation layer was introduced in RFC 4944 standard, which defines three functions, fragmentation, reassembly and fragment forwarding. However, RFC 4944 does not cope well with lossy links since it requires reception of all fragments in order to reassemble the original IPv6 packet. In order to improve network reliability, Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques were proposed that enable recovery of lost fragments using redundancy. In this paper, we thoroughly present the state of the art approaches that use FEC techniques. We then introduce our proposal, namely E-XORFEC, which deploys the ability of recovering different fragments based on redundancy factors. Finally, we implement the considered methods in the 6TiSCH simulator, evaluate their performance and finally show that our proposed method outperforms all of them.